Perhaps I
have gone mad. It’s a possibility that must be considered. If everyone is
acting in a way that I cannot fathom, perhaps they are not crazy, but rather I
am. Such is the case in regard to President-elect Barack Obama.

I have been writing on civil rights
issues since I was in high school, so the magnitude of the first black
president is not lost on me. It’s a big deal. The tear-stained face of Jesse
Jackson was poignant, if only because the emotion was so clearly sincere. The
tears of last Tuesday notwithstanding, America was ready for a black president
as early as 1996, when Colin Powell declined to run. Indeed, so keen has
America been on this score that in 2004 serious people treated Al Sharpton as a
legitimate candidate. Still, it is a major milestone, justly celebrated.

But the euphoric eruption escapes
me. Not so much from excitable college students or the long-suffering wizened
ones who endured segregation, but from some of the sagest commentators.

“You’re lucky to live through big
history. And you’re living through it.” So wrote Peggy Noonan, who knows
something about history, writing speeches as she did for President Reagan when
he was prosecuting the end of the Cold War.

Marcus Gee of the Globe
and Mail, one of Canada’s ablest foreign policy commentators, found
himself in Japan on election night. He watched on the Internet, crying in his
Tokyo hotel room.

“What a moment! What a man!” Gee swooned. “For a few hours, let’s just savour
this moment. History doesn’t serve up many like it: the Liberation of Paris,
the day that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These are times when you can hear the great wheel of history turning, times
when the heart sings with awe at what free people can do, times that make you
feel not so foolish after all to believe in the ultimate triumph of justice and
the power of the human spirit.”

Comparable
to driving the Nazis from Paris? The end of the Soviet Empire? America was not
under totalitarian occupation last week; it conducted a democratic election,
not a rebellion against foreign powers. Nelson Mandela? He walked out of prison
after years of brutal suffering. Mr. Obama went from Columbia to Harvard to the
Illinois Senate to the United States Senate.

Much
of the breathless reporting on the election tried to conjure images of South
Africans voting for the first time in 1994, or other iconic moments of national
revolution and liberation. In point of fact, it was a rather standard American
election.

The
much ballyhooed voter turnout was roughly the same as last time — perhaps one
percentage point more.

The
2008 planet-is-healing election results were roughly equivalent to the
violence-in-the-streets election of 1968, when riots rather than rallies marked
the election year. Those facts were ignored in a desire to inflate the
significance of this election, even beyond historical wheel-turning to
something approaching salvation.

“Dignity
has been restored to humanity,” wrote Moishe Goldstein in a one-line letter to
the National Post. His seemed to take the majority view.

Those
of us who don’t get it are like those in 1997 who thought that the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales, was just a horrible tragedy. This moment feels
something like that, when Britain collectively went mad with real grief, faux
grief and the forced grief of those who wanted desperately to be part of a
historic moment, even if they had to create it themselves.

Perhaps
the best explanation for what is happening comes from the last man who stood
between Sen. Obama and the restoration of humanity: John McCain.

“Nothing
in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself,
something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone,”
McCain wrote in his memoir, Faith of My
Fathers.

Most
people don’t get a chance to fight for a great cause, or even to be around
those who have so fought. But the desire remains, and with a little credulity
and a heap of melodrama, it seems possible to imagine that we are bit players
in a great historical moment. Of course it’s madness. Or is it madness not to
go along with it?